“White House saw chain of reports on bin Laden – ‘The system was blinking red,’ CIA chief told panel” [by Dana Priest, Washington Post]:
In January 2001, two surveillance photographs from the Kuala Lumpur meeting were shown to an informant who was helping both the CIA and FBI. He helped them understand that Al-Midhar was at the meeting along with a man identified as “Khallad” — who by then was known to have planned the Cole bombing. But “we found no effort by the CIA to renew the long-abandoned search for Midhar or his traveling companions,” the report noted.
Also, contrary to the previous testimony of CIA Director Tenet, the agency did not tell the FBI about this discovery until late August 2001, according to the report.
Al-Midhar had left the United States in June 2000 but had plans to return.
“It is possible that if, in January 2001, agencies had resumed their search for him” or placed him on a terrorist watch list, “they might have found him” before he applied for a new visa in June 2001, the report said.
In mid-May 2001, during the height of threat reporting, a CIA official went back through the Al-Midhar files, discovered he had a U.S. visa and that Alhazmi had come to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000.
The agency did not tell the FBI about this discovery until late August 2001.
“FBI Agent Urged Search for Hijacker – Request Was Turned Down Before Attacks, Panel Is Told” [by Dan Eggen and Dana Priest, Washington Post]:
On Sept. 11, after the World Trade Center was struck, the FBI agent and his colleagues received the passenger manifests from the four fatal flights. Yesterday he told the panel that he yelled angrily: “This is the same Almihdhar we’ve been talking about for three months!“
Mid-May 2001: during the height of threat reporting.
Al-Midhar applied for a new visa in June 2001.
“The easy path to the United States for three of the 9/11 hijackers” [by Edward T. Pound, US News & World Report]:
Three of the hijackers in the September 11 terrorist attacks obtained visas in Saudi Arabia through a brand-new program designed to make it easier for qualified visa applicants to visit the United States, an American government official said tonight.
The Visa Express program, put in place just four months before the attacks, allowed the three hijackers to arrange their visas through a State Department-designated travel agency, the official says. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers obtained their U.S. travel visas in Saudi Arabia.
None of the three men, the American government official says, was ever questioned by U.S. consular officers in Saudi Arabia. Each took his travel papers and passport to a commercial travel agency, which submitted the applications to the State Department.
Visa Express “is a bad idea,” says Jessica Vaughan, a former consular officer. “The issuing officer has no idea whether the person applying for the visa is actually the person (listed) in the documents and application.” …
Of the 15 hijackers who obtained their non-immigrant visas in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. official says, 11 received them before the Visa Express program was put into place, in June. The three Saudi nationals who obtained visas through the express program were:
… Khalid al-Midhar, 25, who, the Justice Department says, arrived in the U.S. in July 2001, traveling on a business visa. The FBI believes that al-Midhar was one of five men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.
The official says that the names of the four men–and the names of all the hijackers who obtained their U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia–were run through the State Department’s CLASS database (for Consular Lookout and Support System). The database contains regularly updated records and intelligence information on foreign nationals. “There was no derogatory information in the files,” the official said. …
As the terrorist attacks demonstrated, the information contained in CLASS was far from adequate. …
The names of the hijackers were run through the State Department’s database. There was no derogatory information in the files.
“Panel Clears Handling of Bin Laden Kin on 9/11,” [by MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times]:
The six chartered flights that rushed scores of Saudi citizens out of the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were handled properly by the Bush administration, the independent commission investigating the attacks said in a statement on Tuesday.
A flight on Sept. 20, 2001, carried 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Osama bin Laden, according to the statement. But all 142 passengers on the flights, mostly Saudi citizens, were screened by law enforcement officials, the statement said, to ensure that they were not security threats and not wanted for questioning. The flights were “dealt with in a professional manner” by the government, the commission said. …
Among other critics, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said last September that some of the Saudis who were allowed to leave may have had ties to terrorism. “This is just another example of our country coddling the Saudis and giving them special privileges that others would never get,” he said.
But according to the statement, the F.B.I. checked “a variety of databases” and searched the aircraft. The statement said that it was not clear whether anyone checked a watch list maintained by the State Department, but that a check after the departure showed no matches.
“FBI let ‘top targets’ leave U.S. after 9-11” [by Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily]:
“As far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” [FBI Director] Mueller testified in June 2002 before the joint congressional inquiry into 9-11.
The congressional panel, however, found that some of the hijackers had contacts with more than a dozen FBI persons of interest who helped them find housing, open bank accounts, obtain drivers licenses and locate flight schools, among other things. Some of their facilitators were Saudi nationals. Details of Saudi activities were censored from the final 9-11 report by the White House.
In one of her more explosive queries, Edmonds, the former FBI translator, suggests she has information the FBI allowed “several top targets of FBI investigations related to support networks of terrorist activities” leave the country after the 9-11 attacks “without ever being questioned.”
Newsnight transcript, BBC News
Michael Springman [former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia]:
In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General’s office. I was met with silence. …
What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.
The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department’s faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can’t be looking into some Saudi connections?
